Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
If, as is the case for an increasing number of people, your first experience with an Apple product came via an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, you’ve likely noticed that your iOS device and your Mac offer some of the same features. This is part of Apple’s "Back to the Mac" strategy, where features introduced in iOS, its mobile operating system, are then brought to the Mac OS. One such feature is Notification Center, the subject of today’s lesson.
Notification Center, whether found on an iOS device or a Mac running Mac OS X Mountain Lion, is a place where alert messages of various kinds are gathered together. On the Mac you’ll find a Notification Center icon on the far right of the menu bar—represented by what appears to be a bulleted list. Click this icon, and the Notification Center pane appears.
The topography of Notification Center
Notifications settings
Earlier I mentioned that what appears in Notification Center depends on how you’ve configured it. And configure it you shall in the Notifications system preference. You can reach this preference either by clicking on the aforementioned Settings button or by choosing System Preferences from the Apple menu and clicking on Notifications in the resulting System Preferences window.
Use the Notifications system preference to configured alerts.Read more »
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Today we continue our march through the row of personal system preferences with a long look at the Language & Text preference. As its name implies, within it you’ll find several settings for configuring the language your Mac and Mac’s keyboard use, spelling options, text substitutions, and formatting based on geographical region. These features are available via four tabs. Let’s make our way forward.
Language
Comfortable as the Mac appears to be with the language you natively speak, it’s actually a citizen of the world in regard to language support. It supports dozens of languages as well as a smattering of variations among specific languages (British, Australian, Canadian, and United States English, for example). You find these languages in this first tab.
Input Sources
If you have an inability to imagine what life is like outside your country’s borders, you may believe that Apple ships Macs that work exactly as they do on your home turf. The keyboard is arranged in what we consider the traditional QWERTY order, typing Option-4 invariably produces the ¢ character, and the Mac smells like home cookin.’ (Okay, Macs do smell like home cookin’,—even when that cookin’ involves a heap of cumin and curry powder—but otherwise, no.) It makes little sense to print English alphanumeric characters on keys when another region’s language doesn’t use them. And therefore, the QWERTY arrangement makes little sense on these Macs.
Add language support in the Input Sources tabRead more »
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Last week we joined together to begin exploring Mountain Lion’s System Preferences. This is a journey that will absorb our interest for several weeks to come. But it’s also one that requires us to venture out of System Preferences in order to illustrate what a particular feature does and why you might find it useful. Today’s discussion of Mission Control is exactly that kind of lesson.
One upon a time…
…there were features called Exposé (introduced with Mac OS X 10.3) and Spaces (included with Mac OS X 10.5). They were created to help you unclutter your desktop. While useful for anyone who used a Mac, these features particularly benefited those sitting in front of a small-screen laptop, where desktop real estate is limited.
Good gosh, y’all, what is it good for?
You understand that you can create and delete spaces. Now to the big picture: So what?
The real power of Mission Control is the ability to attach applications to specific spaces. Like so:
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
We’ve covered the basic functions of the Finder from stem to stern. It’s now time to delve into the Mac OS’s system preferences. Like the control panels on Windows PCs, system preferences govern much of the behavior of the Mac OS and the Mac’s peripherals.
To begin your explorations, click the Apple menu in the top-left corner of your Mac’s display and choose System Preferences. Optionally, click the System Preferences icon in the Dock.
When the System Preferences window appears, you’ll see that the items within it (which are called preference panes or pref panes, but I sometimes refer to simply as preferences) are grouped in categories, such as Personal, Hardware, Internet & Wireless, and System. If you’ve added third-party preference panes, they will appear under the Other heading.
Saving and such: Mountain Lion, like Lion before it, has an AutoSave feature, which (in supported applications) will automatically save your changes as you work. Some people found that they didn’t care for this feature as they didn’t want to save the last changes they made before closing a document. When enabled, the first option in this area—'Ask to keep changes when closing documents'—causes a dialog box to appear when you close a document, asking whether you’d like to keep your changes. If you choose not to, the next time you open the document the last version you elected to save is the one that appears (versus the last autosaved version).
The 'Close windows when quitting an application' option addresses another complaint that some people had with Lion: When you restarted an application, all open documents and windows were restored when you next launched the application. Much of the time people want to start fresh rather than with a desktop cluttered with old document windows, and enabling this option makes that possible.
The 'Recent items' pop-up menu is here for no apparent good reason, but it allows you to choose the number of recent documents, applications, and servers that show up when you select the Recent Items command in the Apple menu. Your choices are None, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, and 50.
Screen Saver
And then there’s the Screen Saver tab. Before I delve into its mysteries, a little background.
In the days when Macs weren’t as thin as the worst sort of fashion model, users viewed the Mac interface through CRT (cathode ray tube) monitors—akin to the large picture-tube-bearing televisions of the time. These monitors were prone to a condition called screen burn-in: The phosphor inside the CRT could permanently take on an image when that image was projected to it for months on end—the image of the Mac’s menu bar, for example, was commonly burned in. The burn-in left ghost images on the display that were distracting.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
As we began this grand adventure, I devoted the second installment to those things you spied on the Finder desktop after you’d started your Mac. One of those items was the Dock—the bar at the bottom of your Mac’s screen where you launch applications, access currently running applications, and tuck away items that you want quick access to. This week I’d like to delve a bit deeper into what you can do with the Dock.
By way of refresher, the left side of the Dock is devoted to applications—programs that Apple placed there, applications you’ve dragged there, and programs you’ve launched. The right side of the Dock (the area that appears after the divider) is for folders, files, minimized windows, and the Trash.
The items in the Dock are aliases of the original items, meaning that when you click the Safari icon to launch the browser, for example, you’re really clicking an icon that represents Safari rather than the true-blue Safari application itself. Because it's an alias you can safely remove it from the Dock by dragging it to the desktop without fear of deleting the original. Note, however, that you can’t drag the icon of an active application to the desktop in the hope that you’ll remove its icon from the Dock. You must first quit the application; once you do, you can remove it.
One has views on the matter
We’ve got application icons down cold. Now let’s talk about other items you can place in the Dock. We’ll start with the generic-looking About Downloads item that appears just to the left of the Trash. What is that thing?
Broadly, it’s a hint at how folders are represented in the Dock. Click and hold on that document, and you see a couple of items—About Downloads and Open in Finder—spout up from the Dock. If you’ve downloaded a few other items, they will appear here too.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Last week I discussed two ways to search your Mac: using Spotlight, and invoking the Finder’s Find command. This week we turn to an automated form of search: smart searches.
Smart searches let you define one or more conditions that yield a set of files satisfying those conditions. You can then save the search and retrieve it later. Which means what exactly? Allow me to show rather than tell.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
As we meander down life’s path, we tend to pick up bits of this and that. And, over time, these things pile up to the point where, if we’re not organized, we lose track of them. And this often results in cries of “Honey/Mom/Dad/Jeeves, have you seen my glasses/lunchbox/dueling pistols!?” Wouldn’t it be great if the answer was more helpful than, “Well, where did you last see them?”
While there may be little we can do about locating these kinds of physical treasures, we needn’t have that happen with the files and folders on our Macs. And to prevent exactly this kind of thing, Apple has brought us Spotlight, technology built into OS X that allows us to easily find the items we seek.
It works this way: When you first install Mac OS X, Spotlight kicks into gear and begins indexing the contents of your drive. It keeps track of not only the names of your files and folders, but also their contents, the day and time each was created, the kind of files they are, and much more. As you create new files and folders, Spotlight indexes them as well, adding all this information to a hidden database file that it can later query to help you locate the stuff on your Mac.
But wait, there’s more…
You can do more with this Spotlight menu than just conduct searches. You can, for example, launch applications. To do that, just start typing the name of the application you want to open. When its name appears in the Spotlight menu, highlight it and press Return. The application will open.
More? Okay, enter a word whose definition you want. Near the bottom of the menu, you’ll see a Look Up entry, followed by the icon of a book. Highlight this entry, and the definition of the word will appear in a preview window.
Really narrow your search
“Chris, dude, this really isn’t cutting it. Even with the ability to search just these locations, I’m seeing too many results!”
Indeed you are. As I said, this is a way to broadly narrow your search. Let’s get more specific.
